Professor Michael Fried

Michael Fried will show Demand's two minute long stop-motion film Pacific Sun (2011) (the name of a cruise ship struck by seven powerful waves off the coast of New Zealand several years ago), and will discuss the film and artist in detail.

Michael Fried is a poet, art historian, art critic and literary critic. He is Professor, J. R. Herbert Boone Chair in the Humanities (secondary appointment: Department of the History of Art) at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. He has written extensively about an array of subjects, spanning abstract painting and sculpture since World War II to French painting and art criticism from the mid-eighteenth century to the advent of Edouard Manet (and beyond). He has also written about writers and artists Charles Baudelaire, Joseph Conrad, Gustave Caillebotte, Roger Fry, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Jeff Wall, Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Demand, and other contemporary 'art' photographers.

Fried has also written on Caravaggio and the transformation of Italian painting circa 1600, and most recently about the contemporary artists Anri Sala, Charles Ray, Joseph Marioni, and Douglas Gordon. He is currently embarked on a short book on 'Madame Bovary,' to be called Flaubert's Gueuloir.